Jack Bui

Affiliation: UCSD SOM

Assistant Professor of Pathology

Biography

Jack Bui received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at San Diego. He then trained as a clinical pathology resident at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also worked as a post-doctoral fellow on innate immunity and cancer. He joined the faculty at UCSD in August 2006.

Research Summary

Our laboratory is interested in how the innate immune system recognizes developing tumor cells. Toward this end, we have generated a bank of tumor cell lines which we believe are enriched in recognition structures that activate innate immune components, including natural killer (NK) cells and macrophages. We hope to understand the molecular basis of this recognition.

We also have focused on a family of ligands for the NK cell receptor NKG2D. These NKG2D ligands are highly expressed on tumors, virally infected cells, and in certain autoimmune diseased tissues. We have shown that the NKG2D ligand H60 is regulated by the interferons and may function in this aspect to modulate the immune system. We are actively pursuing the regulation of H60 during carcinogenesis in order to understand how recognition structures might be acquired during the transformation process.

A related interest is in how T-regulatory cells inhibit the immune response to tumors. We have shown that these cells accumulate in both progressively growing and rejecting tumors. We plan to identify the mechanisms by which T-regulatory cells become activated in certain tumors for clinical benefit.